Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships

The book employs a loosely chronological format as it explores thematic chapters organized around a wide range of topics including, male-male intimacy in the fledgling colonies, among soldiers, in the rhetoric of abolitionism, in the imported literature of the early Republic, in the religious fervor of the second Great Awakening, and in the everyday experiences of soldiers, prospectors, cattlemen, businessmen, slaves, and ordinary early American men. Using Alfred Kinsey's 1948 statistic that 4 percent of white men are exclusively homosexual and the 1790 United States Census, Benemann starts with the premise that "we need to assume that 32, 292 white males with a homosexual orientation were living in the United States in 1790." (xiii) Benemann argues "I am convinced that there were men who were homosexual" in early America, and that they "regarded themselves as different from their comrades, a difference based solely on their sexual response." (xv) This is not simply a matter of source interpretation.